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If Bertha Sun‘s illustrations look a bit like fashion sketches, that’s no accident. A Hong Kong-based illustrator and designer—and recently named one of Perspective magazine’s 40 under 40—Sun started out working in the textile industry, and she honed her skills sketching outfits and fabric designs. Maybe that’s why so many of her drawings feature either women striking a pose, or abstract patterns that wouldn’t look out of place on a summer dress.

Sun’s been drawing since she was small, and she studied art formally in college at the Rhode Island School of Design. Rather than major in illustration, she opted to take a more practical route and study textiles, and went on to take a job in fashion. That field that gave her the chance to see her designs in the real world. “Textiles, to me, meant creating interactive artwork,” she says. “You can look at it, wear it, sit on it, or all of the above. Illustration back then played a smaller role in my work—I simply used it as application drawings.”

After several years working in the fashion industry in Hong Kong and New York, Sun decided to set out on her own and expand to other media. Now her studio, Yet Another Name, handles branding and design for a portfolio of clients from the fashion world and beyond. As she puts it, she couldn’t resist the temptation of working in more than one kind of art: “I guess I just became greedy.” And that work led her back to illustration.

She works both by computer and by hand, switching back and forth for maximum control and freedom. “I like creating layouts on the computer so I can really play around, and I like doing the actual drawing by hand to get a more natural touch,” she explains. “It also allows room for happy accidents.” In the work shown here, she explores human figures, flowers, and abstract patterns and shapes.

For Sun, illustration is a way to freely explore both her emotions and her technique. “I’m always experimenting with ways to combine my love of patterns and shapes into my illustrations,” she says. Her sketches here are a series of studies in line and color, and the questions they raise are of a formal nature. “What effect does it give a piece when certain parts of the subject become just a flat shape? What happens when the patterned background swallows the foreground?” The answer is a series of works with a casual, offhand elegance.

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Can a voice from over a thousand years ago speak to us in our language? Chloe Garcia Roberts makes a persuasive case that it can. Her new translation of Li Shangyin’s selected verse, published in a bilingual edition by NYRB Poets, has made one of the titans of China’s literary tradition freshly available in English. A poet in her own right and managing editor of the Harvard Review, Garcia Roberts has published a book of verse titled The Reveal, as well as an earlier chapbook of Li Shangyin’s minor poems called Derangements of My Contemporaries. She reaches across the centuries to bring Li startlingly close, and the figure that emerges is contemporary but irreducibly enigmatic, always withdrawing beyond our grasp.

Li Shangyin (813-858), also known by his literary name, Yi Shan, lived toward the end of the Tang dynasty. Over the course of his short life, he penned a series of strikingly beautiful compositions regarded as enigmatic even by the standards of his day. Tang poets such as Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu—to name the three most familiar to Western readers—prized suggestion and evocation; Li Shangyin, writing nearly a century after them, pushed this tendency to an extreme, and added a sensuality and allusiveness all his own. If poetry from this tradition is always hard to render in English, Li Shangyin poses unique challenges.

Garcia Roberts identifies two: “The first challenge is the language itself. The divide between poetic Classical Chinese and modern English is vast, particularly in sentence structure, the sparsity of pronouns, the layered symbolism and allusion,” she explains. “The second is Li Shangyin’s particular poetics. He is not by any means a poet who moves completely in tandem with the currents of his tongue. Instead he is constantly playing with, pushing against, subverting the language he writes in.” Translating him entails capturing not only the meaning, but also the occasional strangeness of his words.

Even readers who don’t understand Chinese will be struck by how different the two versions look. The original poems are compact blocks of text, often just a few lines in length, with a uniform number of characters per line (five or seven). The translations, by contrast, typically run twice as long and have shaggily uneven verses.

Classical Chinese has a conciseness that’s nearly impossible to replicate in English, and this poses a dilemma for the translator: do you try to capture the brevity through a string of isolated monosyllables, or fill in the spaces with explanation that’s absent in the original? Garcia Roberts seeks to steer a course between the two extremes. “Where I could, I tried to shave down the English to its sparest possible form,” she says. “However, I did try to maintain a balance, to avoid veering into a parody of the economy of language on one side or over effusion in rendering the lushness of Li’s images on the other.”

An example of her approach is “Retirement,” a short meditation on yearning for home. Here’s the original, followed by her translation.

端居

远书归梦两悠悠
只有空床敌素秋
阶下青苔与红树
雨中寥落月中愁

Retirement

Distant letters, dreams of returning
Both are few and far away.

All I have: an empty bed
Set against a pale autumn.

Down the steps:
Green moss, red trees.

Inside the rain: sinking emptiness.
Inside the moon: anguish.

The English version expands the original’s four lines into four stanzas, yet it still feels pared-down. Garcia Roberts achieves this not by using shorter words or being overly clipped, but by eliminating verbs: the poem consists of sentence fragments linked by colons. In this, she finds a clever substitute for the original’s succinctness, a sort of mirror that obliquely reflects a feature with no obvious equivalent in English.

If brevity is one challenge Li Shangyin poses, ambiguity is another. Often his poems are open to multiple readings—not just differing interpretations, or even various translation possibilities, but distinct ways of parsing the text. Take the first two lines of one of his many untitled pieces:

来是空言去绝踪
月斜楼上五更钟

Come is a hollow word.Go severs all traces.
Moon slants over building roofs.
Bells of the fifth watch.

This is a literal rendering of the Chinese, almost a gloss, yet it’s not necessarily the most self-evident translation. Compare the very different lines by A.C. Graham, in one of many alternate versions of various poems included in an appendix:

Coming was an empty promise, you have gone, and left no footprint:
The moonlight slants above the roof, already the fifth watch sounds.

Graham starts from a very different understanding of the poem: you said you’d come but didn’t, now you’ve disappeared without a trace. By adding “you” and putting the verbs in the past tense, he sketches out a miniature narrative. Garcia Roberts, by contrast, takes come and go to refer to the words themselves, not actions taken by anyone in particular. She avoids creating an explicit backstory, trusting readers to draw their own connections.

The difference between these translations doesn’t lie in their fidelity: both are plausible readings of the poem. It’s a question of how explicit they make what’s implicit, and which aspects of the original they seek to convey—the meaning of the lines, or their brevity, their elusiveness.

This “elusive and haunting quality” is what first drew Garcia Roberts to Li’s poetry. His lines are often tantalizingly hard to pin down, even with China’s long tradition of exegesis. “Maybe similar to the exercise of taking apart an engine to see how it works, my translations at first were simply attempts to better learn, from the inside out, how his poetry could be at once so moving and so unknowable.”

Her versions don’t dispel that unknowability but instead bring it admirably into English. This is no simple task, as a vague sentence is often much harder to render than one whose meaning is precise. “The cryptic nature of his work was an element that I wanted to recreate in the English,” she explains. “There are certainly instances where ambiguity of meaning made my job easier, but there were also instances where the task of rebuilding such ambiguity in an approximation of the exact way it exists in the Chinese cost me a lot of anguish.”

The hardest poem to translate, she says, was “Night Rain Sent North.” Not coincidentally, it’s also one of the simplest. “I’ve always thought of this poem as a perfect Möbius strip of time. It is typical of Li Shangyin in his poetry to move his reader across vast distances, both temporal and physical, but in the last line of this poem he does this so quickly as to almost give us whiplash.” Once again the original is a short block of text, while the English version unwinds into several lines.

夜雨寄北

君问归期未有期
巴山夜雨涨秋池
何当共剪西窗烛
却话巴山夜雨时

Night Rain Sent North

You ask the date of my return.
No date is set.
The autumn pools on Ba Mountain
Welling with night rain.

How will that moment ever be: Together,
Trimming a candle at the west window,
And me, recounting
This rainy spell on Ba Mountain?

In just a few short lines, poem seems to flip time upside down: the speaker, on a rainy night on Ba Mountain, longs to return to a loved one—often understood to be the poet’s wife—and is carried away by that longing to imagine a future moment when they’ll both be together and looking back, not without nostalgia, on this same rainy night. Longing bleeds into memory, and the poem ends where it began.

Li Shangyin has found a distinct and compelling voice in Garcia Roberts. Rather than explaining away his ambiguities, she presents him in all his seductive, suggestive charm. The fragments of meaning she offers, like shards of a glass for the reader to piece together, reflect a flitting, disarmingly beautiful light.

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Best known as the Malaysian winner of the second season of Asia’s Next Top Model who now walks runways around the world, Sheena Liam has also crafted a name for herself as an embroidery artist. Her delicate, minimalist art is sewn through with images of freedom and self-care.

She first picked up needlework from her mother in childhood, but only later on in her modeling career did she revisit the old-fashioned craft. It started out as a peaceful, expressive activity to keep herself occupied during downtime between jobs, but she slowly began taking it more seriously, and before she knew it she’d made a series.

“I was never really drawn to it as a practice until I started seeing all these other artists breaking boundaries with embroidered work, and I realized we weren’t bound to tradition and stagnant designs,” Liam says. Like the carefree movement of the hair detail, each piece is open to interpretation. “I’m not pushing any agenda on anyone.”

The figures in her works are often based on Liam herself, stitched with dark-green thread that stands out against the off-white linen. They can take anywhere from four days to a month to complete, depending on their size and complexity. “Sometimes I’m doing something completely new, so it takes some trial and error before I have a finished product I’m okay with,” she explains.

Each piece explores a moment in a woman’s life, from simple daily routines, like changing clothes or getting ready for a girl’s night out, to subtle moments of empowerment, like independently braiding or cutting off one’s hair for the first time. Just as she does in her modeling, her figures convey a mood or feeling through posture and pose. The free-flowing hair adds a gentle movement to contrast with the static figure, making the whole piece come alive. Though the style is minimalist, the figures are rich in detail.

“The actual embroidering is my favorite part of the process, so I try to prolong it by adding as much detail as possible,” she says. “The hair can be frustrating because I don’t have a set formula or technique. Every piece is different, and sometimes at the hair stage, which I usually do last, I might ruin a piece I’ve spent hours on.”

Inspiration comes from anything: a song, a general mood, or even a feeling. Liam compiles images from the internet onto her mini mood board and has even sought inspiration in life drawing classes. “You get to explore other different types of bodies and poses through the models,” she explains.

As someone who’s made a career out of being someone else’s canvas, here she has the freedom to express her own creativity.

In April 2017, Liam decided to share her work on Instagram under the handle @times.new.romance, a play on the name of the popular font. The handle suggests a romantic feeling of viewing peaceful modern moments fleeting by, in keeping with her art—but perhaps this writer has put too much thought into it. “I just thought it was a nice name for an account,” Liam says. The account eventually gained widespread attention from media, art-lovers, and fans, leading to her first solo exhibition, a milestone in any artist’s career.

In October, the embroidery works were presented at Item Gallery in Paris in a show also titled Times New Romance. As it happens, Liam dismissed the idea of a solo show when she was first approached about it. “I didn’t think too much of my embroidery to start with,” she says. “Honestly, it was a lot of people putting a huge amount of faith in me from the start that propelled me to work on a body of cohesive work. I had collectors and other artists who took care of me, so I could work in the capacity that I did.”

“I’m not sure. I’ve held out on a lot of projects because I wanted to be focused on creating pieces for my show. But maybe now I can relax a little and have more fun with it. If offered the right space and gallery, I’d consider a show in Malaysia. But I don’t have any pieces anymore, so it’ll probably take a few more years.”

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Cities change at a rapid clip. Blink and your favorite spot is gone. You’re lucky if you even get a chance to say goodbye. When you do get fair warning, you’ve got to make the best of the time you have left. Club Hawaii has weathered the constant upheaval of Singapore’s development frenzy for so long that some claim it’s the oldest remaining nightclub on the island. But time is creeping up on it, too. While it’s not closing its doors, it will get a significant renovation.

That news caught the attention of AikBeng Chia, a photographer who first experienced the venue back in 2000 but didn’t return for over a decade when he started shooting then. Hawaii had remained in a sort of stasis, and the impending change triggered a sense of nostalgia for him. With the owner’s permission, he set out to immortalize its unique vibe before the old made way for the new.

Worn orange booths, red cushioned walls, rainbow LEDs: he captured all of it, this whole familiar space that envelops a cast of characters he’d grown to consider friends. A largely elderly clientele listens to a collection of female singers on stage, many of whom immigrated from China. Some customers busy themselves at the pool table or huddle up at the bar. Others lounge in the booths. “It’s filled with characters,” Chia says. “From loan sharks, bookies, and gangsters to retirees, uncles, and aunties. It’s an interesting mix.” He shoots them in various ways, either with their permission after sharing a beer (or two) , or sneaking shots without their knowledge. “Obviously, I can’t photograph the gangsters,” he laughs.

The series is entirely digital, and he adds grains and color grade to give it the feel of film. Since film is a dated medium, it immediately evokes a sense of the past. Maybe that’s why people often refer to film as “warm.” It may be heretical to shoot digital that looks like film in some circles, but Chia is unconcerned with purist nitpicking. Photography is a form of therapy for him.

As a professional illustrator, Chia felt stuck creatively, so he decided to pick up photography in 2008, at age 40 using an early model iPhone. And he got hooked. Today he uses a Leica Q digital camera, but he’s still fond of shooting with his iPhone (now an XS Max). “Photography is a way for me to manage my depression,” he says. “Sometimes it works, sometimes not.”

He shot the Club Hawaii series in collaboration with filmmaker Nicky Loh. They call it The Night We Never Met, because each started the same project without the other’s knowledge until they coincidentally bumped into each other in the street.

Although it’s about a single nightclub, it speaks to the city at large: “Singapore is constantly changing. Recently a 100-year-old flea market closed down to make way for commercial buildings. So this is Singapore.”

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Bauhaus is turning one hundred. The iconic German art school first opened its doors in 1919, in Weimar, and was shut down just fourteen years later, when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Over the course of its brief life, it became synonymous with modern design. It stripped furniture and building façades of ornamental frills, and its minimalist aesthetic set the tone for architecture around the world. By the middle of the century its imprint could be seen everywhere from Japan to Israel to Yugoslavia—though perhaps nowhere is it so visible as in the United States, where many of the artists and architects who studied and taught at the school, a number of whom were Jewish, fled in 1933.

Today, the “International Style” that Bauhaus popularized is viewed with more ambivalence: on the one hand, it gave us austere masterpieces like Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York, and on the other, it led to the soulless corporate blocks that make so many downtowns look identical. In any event, Bauhaus’s function-first ethos still has a devoted following, in Asia as much as in Europe or the Americas. And even though a century has gone by, it may still have something to teach us today. That’s the thinking behind a recent series of workshops held in Shanghai to mark the school’s 100th anniversary.

Sponsored by the Department of Culture and Education of the German Consulate General in Shanghai, the workshops were organized by Shen Qilan, a Chinese curator, educator, and writer who maintains close ties to Germany, where she completed her doctorate in philosophy. “Bauhaus is an outstanding intellectual tradition, but it’s not often talked about here,” says Shen. She organized the events with two aims. “First, to introduce people to the existence and value of the Bauhaus tradition. And second, to ask what that tradition has to do with our current moment in 2018 or 2019. Often we see things from 1919 as documents, as something from the past. Yet Bauhaus, I firmly believe, is relevant to the present.”

The workshops began in the spring, with a series of four sessions titled Bauhaus Class 1.0. “Shen Qilan invited several prominent scholars from the Chinese cultural scene,” says Oliver Hartmann, head of the Department of Culture and Education. “The first class was really successful: there were 100, 120 people sitting there drawing, working with fabrics, being creative, learning from Chinese experts about Bauhaus.” That success led them to organize Bauhaus Class 2.0, a longer set of six classes in the fall. “The first course focused on Bauhaus’s past, and the second one focused more on its legacy,” he explains. “The second course also had a practical dimension, because we did city walks: students went outside to experience and compare buildings, and they also visited our experts in their studios.” Both courses filled up quickly with people from a variety of backgrounds who shared little more than an interest in design—at least one parent even brought a child. Students who attended all four classes in the spring, or all six in the fall, and successfully completed the homework, received a certificate.

Still, what does Bauhaus have to do with Shanghai, a city that after all is better known for its art deco treasures and its postmodern skyscrapers? As Shen explains, Bauhaus had an important, albeit indirect, influence in China. “The most profound impact it had was on architectural thought. Of course there wasn’t any direct influence, because no Chinese students studied at the Bauhaus, but its thinking was passed on,” she says.

When the Bauhaus school opened in 1919, at the start of the interwar period, German society found itself in the midst of radical economic and political upheavals. “It was a time of large-scale industrial production, and society as a whole was figuring out how to respond, in thought, in art, in culture, in design,” says Shen. Bauhaus responded with designs that prioritized efficiency above all else: from high rises to chairs, its forms are sleek and linear, reduced to their core elements. “What’s fascinating is that, at a time of momentous change, a group of particularly independent-minded people came to use their own means to address problems raised by the society and the times.” They offered an elegant visual language for a newly industrialized world.

One hundred years later, artists and architects face a different context and a different set of challenges. For one thing, cities today are vastly bigger than they were in 1919, as Shen readily acknowledges. “Today in Asia, cities with populations in the tens of millions are normal. With tens of millions of people, how do you design housing, how do you design offices, how do you design streets? The spaces we live in are totally different.”

Yet that doesn’t mean that Bauhaus is no longer relevant. “We can’t use products designed by the Bauhaus to meet our current needs,” Shen explains, “but the school’s thought, its belief in responding to the needs of the times—that’s something we can use in the present.”

Both courses, Bauhaus Class 1.0 and 2.0, used the philosophy of this design tradition to look at the urban environments. One class, led by Bu Bing, turned students’ attention to the street just outside the cultural center, Middle Shandong Road. Students spent time watching the street, sought to understand it, and then invented their own symbolic system to respond to it. “You first observe the street, then you condense it to a symbol. You can capture this symbol in a photo, you can respond through dance, you can draw a map.” For students and teachers alike, this requires looking at a familiar environment with fresh eyes. “You have to look at the street again, this short stretch of road that’s only 400 meters long. We found that not one person had ever looked at it so closely.”

The Bauhaus workshops are part of a varied array of courses, exhibitions, film series, talks, and other events that the German consulate puts on in Shanghai. Shen sees these as an important platform for cultural exchange, where people can learn not just about a particular topic but about different modes of thought. “Germany has a very important tradition of kritisch zu sein, that is, being critical. If you say something, I won’t just agree with it—I’ll analyze it and maybe say that 70% I agree with, 30% I doubt,” she says. “They really respect intellectuals.” Both Hartmann and Shen stress the importance of making sure these exchange go both ways, so that people in the West can learn about China.

Shanghai is a few months ahead of the curve in celebrating the Bauhaus centenary. In 2019 events will take place around the world to commemorate the school, most notably a series of exhibitions called Bauhaus Imaginista. Shen is excited for so many people to learn about this tradition, whose life was a short as it was transformative. “Everyone can experience the power of art to change your life,” she notes. “That’s part of Bauhaus.”

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The murals of Taiwanese artist Debe balance deep dives into abstract patterns with a healthy respect for letter work. Kaleidoscopic, geometric wormholes and melting clouds swirl around graffiti-style words, while ripped paper edges and stark, angular shifts of color cut across his work. His pieces vibrate with energy, hypnotically drawing the eye into or along the wall.

Despite having no formal art or design training, Debe creates paintings with a studied personal style, avoiding the trends that dominate the world of street art. The swirling mandalas and interlocking shapes are an evolving element in his work. “Abstract shapes are a way for me to transfer my emotions. Whether I’m angry or anxious, I throw it up on the wall,” he explains.

Originally inspired by a local graffiti crew named Soul Skool and an online forum called Art Crimes, Debe began lurking along train tracks in his hometown Taoyuan during high school in 2005. He would experiment on tunnel walls with a local aerosol brand called PP. “When I was really young, my mom said I loved drawing on walls and the furniture, so maybe I was just meant to do it,” he laughs. The trackside walls were covered with pieces by other artists who further inspired him, like Dabs, one of the island’s best-known graffiti writers.

Local recognition first came from Debe’s posts on Wretch, a now-defunct Taiwanese social media platform. “I’m still trying to figure out how to connect the culture from home with my graffiti and street art,” he says. “Taiwanese society has always felt too traditional to me.”

He got early international acclaim in 2013 by painting in the first POW! WOW! Taiwan and Hong Kong Walls festivals. Now that the world knows his work, he gets to travel, painting in distant cities like Montreal and Brooklyn. It’s a good thing being an artist has worked out for him: “I used to do odd jobs, like working in a convenience store or a factory, but never for longer two months. I was never able do a ‘normal’ job well.”

Multi-color, wildstyle pieces have always been Debe’s focus, but when he just starting out he also liked to tag around town. Back then the police didn’t really even care and would simply tell him stop or to paint over his tags. But now that Taiwan has become a destination for traveling graffiti writers, the authorities have started to catch on. He still likes to tag now and then, but he mostly prefers more thoughtful interventions. “I’d rather paint some fun emojis on an advertising poster or something,” he says. “Something that inspires people, or makes them smile or think in a different way.”

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On November 23, the fourth annual Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival will open its doors in Xiamen, on China’s southeastern coast. Those lucky enough to nab tickets to the event, which closes on January 2nd, will catch sight of work by some of the most innovative artists working in photography today.

A spin-off of the Rencontres d’Arles, the prestigious photo festival held every summer in southern France, Jimei x Arles will bring together work by established international figures and up-and-coming artists in China. Inspiration for the event came from Chinese photographer RongRong, one of the founders of the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre—the first museum of its kind in China—and Sam Stourdzé, director of the Arles festival.

Each year the festival gives a Discovery Award to an emerging Chinese photographer. This year’s ten finalists—Shen Wei, Shao Ruilu, Su Jiehao, Pixy Liao, Coca Dai, Yang Wenbin, Lau Wai, Hu Wei, Lei Lei, and Wong Wingsang—show intensely personal work that spans the breadth of the medium. Neocha is proud to showcase the work of these photographers.

沈玮 Shen Wei

Shen Wei‘s photoshave a deceptive stillness, like a muscle at rest. An image of the artist pausing as he descends into a pool is permeated with an eerie tension, while a photo of newly opened cherry buds seem to leap out of the frame. Two close-up self-portraits—one with eyes open, one with eyes closed—cloak his features in darkness, hiding as much as they reveal. Shen’s careful manipulation of light and color imbue static images with dynamic strength.

邵睿璐 Shao Ruilu

Shao Ruilu’s photos are visual riddles whose answers lie just beyond our reach. Perhaps the coins in various currencies suspended in mid-air offer a commentary on international finance or economic uncertainty. Perhaps the two still lifes, composed like paintings by Zurbarán, are a gloomy meditation on mortality: between one frame and the next, the peaches have rotted, the ash pile has grown, the newspaper’s been replaced. With her unusual subject matter, Shao raises questions that linger long in your mind.

苏杰浩 Su Jiehao

At first glance, Su Jiehao‘s photographs look like pure compositions of color and form—you could be forgiven for mistaking them for abstract paintings. Only upon closer examination do they come into focus as ordinary scenes: a ruler, a rainbow, a rooftop covered in snow. The final three images—stills from his video The Storm in the Morning—are less abstract but no less enigmatic. With his stunning sense of composition, Su creates images with an arresting beauty.

廖逸君 Pixy Liao

For the past eleven years, Pixy Liao has been documenting her life with her boyfriend Moro in the photo series ExperimentalRelationship. Often she places him in submissive positions, upending the traditional gender roles in which she was brought up. In these images, Liao, previously the subject of a Neocha profile, examines intimacy with a playful eroticism.

戴建勇 Coca Dai

Shot over a period of seven years, Coca Dai‘s series Judy Zhu 2008-2015 chronicles the life of his girlfriend (now wife) Judy through pregnancy and motherhood. His images have an unrehearsed quality that only film can provide, and taken together, they offer a candid, multi-faceted portrait of one woman in contemporary China.

杨文彬 Yang Wenbin

While other artists here explore love and relationships, Yang Wenbin shows the technology involved in solitary expressions of desire. The photos in his series Euphoric Mirror are utterly without eroticism: in one, vibrators are presented as simple industrial products, assembled on production lines in factories; in another, a computer mouse in a crotch hints at the dissatisfactions of internet stimulation. Yang’s offers an unsentimental view of sexuality in the digital age.

刘卫 Lau Wai

In her series Memories of theFuture, Hong Kong artist Lau Wai takes old photos and film stills of her hometown and adds her own cyberpunk touches. The effect is playful but hints at a more serious purpose: is she suggesting that the city’s history, as documented in photos from the last century, is as fake and retouched as her own images? Or is she hinting that Hong Kong’s future won’t be so different from its past? Lau’s work offers an ambiguous meditation on fantasy and time.

胡伟 Hu Wei

Hu Wei explores the commemoration of the past in his unconventional series Proposal for Public Assembly / Encounter. A native of Dalian, he presents photos and souvenirs of the monument built in 1995 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the city’s liberation from Japanese occupiers. By using found images nearly as old as he is, Hu challenges the very notion of what constitutes photography. And when the past can’t be openly discussed, he perhaps offers an oblique commentary on which histories are remembered and which are passed over in silence.

雷磊 Lei Lei

Like many of the other Discovery Award finalists, Lei Lei uses digitally altered images to test the boundaries of photography. His 1700 Poses of Human Gesture shows the same girl sitting in countless different positions, while other images of his shown here present small variations in a violinist’s pose. Carefully manipulated to look old, Lei’s photos explore the ability of photography to capture the reality and the past from more than one perspective.

黄永生 Wong Wingsang

Reflection and repetition underpin the work of Wong Wingsang. Polaroid head shots, samples of leaves, a sunset framed through reflections in a window: in each case, Wong draws our attention to tiny differences in nearly identical images. Conversely, his final photo included here—a triptych consisting of a house cat, cruise ships, and a solid black square—seems to dare us to find a common thread among seemingly unrelated images.

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Walk a bit too briskly down Anfu Road and you might miss Square Gallery, one of Shanghai’s newest art spaces, and easily its least spacious. Tucked away inside a residential alleyway, it doesn’t advertise itself, even if its fresh coat of white paint makes it stand out amid the old bicycles and hanging laundry. It’s a small structure, the size of a cramped living room, that juts out from an 100-year-old apartment building—the sort of jerry-rigged addition you find throughout the city, probably built when some enterprising homeowner decided they wanted a bit more room. Now that room houses an impressive international collection of contemporary paintings and drawings. Some hang on the walls, while others are stacked two or three deep on the shelves. When you’ve got such a tiny space, you’ve got to be creative about how you use it.

Square Gallery is the work of Shi Jianfang, an independent curator and artist who moved to Shanghai in 2018. He sits inside nearly every day from 11 to 10, welcoming the passersby who approach shyly, as though they’re not sure they’re even allowed down the private lane. “My space really is very small, and if several visitors arrive at the same time, some have to wait a bit outside. But for art, waiting builds anticipation,” he says. Those bold enough (or patient enough) to venture inside are rewarded with an expertly curated collection leaning heavily toward street art.

Shi grew up in Jiangsu Province and moved to Kiev for college and graduate school. When he returned to China with degrees in painting, he moved to Suzhou, where a local initiative offered artists free studio and living space in return for a few of their works. One year later he opened his first gallery there, Square Art Space—a precursor to Square Gallery—and eventually set up a sort of artist-in-residence program, inviting artists he’d met on his travels to stay and work in Suzhou for a month. “In Suzhou we set up a platform where international artists living in China or working here for a short time could interact and make art,” he explains. “Through exhibitions and other events, global artists share their creative experiences and their impressions of China with a Chinese public.”

The artists he picks come from China, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and beyond. A trip to Barcelona let him acquire work by two well-known street artists, Konair and El Xupet Negre. “I wandered into a gallery in the Ciutat Vella and instantly fell in love with a piece by Konair. I decided to buy it, and just as I was leaving, Konair came in and the gallery owner introduced us,” he recalls. They hit it off over coffee, and six months later Shi invited him to attend Suzhou’s first graffiti art show. Konair suggested he also invite El Xupet Negre, whose iconic black pacifiers cover walls throughout Barcelona.

In 2018, Shi decided to move his project to Shanghai, drawn to the city’s unparalleled cultural scene. “Shanghai is a multicultural city where people from around the world are constantly moving to live and work,” he explains. “It’s a very cosmopolitan, inclusive place filled with possibilities of every kind. There’s no better place to exhibit works by outstanding international artists.”

Shi welcomes visitors, and he enjoys the intimacy of the space, because it lets him talk with them face to face. “I like the people who visit to interact with me. All I ask is that they have an interest in art and treat each of the works with respect. What I don’t like is people who just breeze through and glance around.”

The space may be small, but Shi’s ambitions are big. He’s clear about what he aims to achieve: “To get more people to embrace, appreciate, and collect contemporary art. To get more outstanding artists from around the world to ‘dwell’ in Square Gallery, and to become a long-lasting, healthy, active, and creative collection gallery and exhibition space for contemporary artists from around the world.”

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As a teenager in the early ‘90s, Mojoko would wander the streets of Hong Kong, reveling in the constant barrage of flashing lights and neon signs. “Hong Kong was sensory overload,” he recalls. “The video game arcades were the coolest.” Although he went to Europe for college and didn’t return to Asia for nearly a decade, that part of his life left an indelible mark. As his identity as an artist developed, that chaotic array of pop culture images came to define his style.

Mojoko is a collage artist and illustrator. His works are crowded with movie posters, old logos, brand icons, and comic book images inspired by the futuristic sheen of his hometown, with the hypnotic glow of underground arcades and the glitzy advertisements of a hyper-capitalist society. At first he sought out those images stamped on his childhood brain, but the quest for vintage from his day quickly evolved into a passion for even older images going back as far as the middle of the twentieth century.

“There were thousands of game halls in Hong Kong, and some were really dodgy. You could smoke and hang out there all day,” he says. “Revisiting or discovering treasures from those days really gets me buzzing. I recently discovered an old TV Times from Hong Kong with ads for things I had totally forgotten about, like Rolex in Chinese and Rambo with Chinese subtitles. It was a weird mix of pop culture from the West.

“But I find the real chemistry happens in collage when you mix the old with the new. There’s some funny ’50s Chinese pop culture material which I didn’t even know existed before I started digging. Also Malaysia and Indonesia have some really progressive magazines and music from the ’50s and ’60s to draw upon.”

Although his collages are pieced together digitally, all the material comes from physical sources stored in stacks of boxes all over Singapore, where he’s lived for 15 years. He also paints, creating the same collage effect, but using a comic-style with monotone linework. When he creates mural-sized pieces, he usually scales them up with wheat paste paper.

While his work can be a little risqué, full of suggestively clad female stars and violent supervillains, Mojoko has begun trying to make more child-friendly art. He decided that the gallery he founded, Kult Gallery, wasn’t the right place to present his new trajectory, so he handed it off to the next generation and started the magazine EYEYAH!, which aims to educate kids with progressive artwork. “Becoming a dad changed my career, but not my art. I still can’t make kids’ artwork,” he laughs. “But that’s where the magazine comes in, where we use the tricks of advertising for good instead of selling shit we don’t need.”

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Calligraphy’s beauty lies in the energy behind each stroke, and performances that show the motion of the brush bring to light one of the art form’s normally hidden aspects. Mami, a calligraphy artist from Japan, figured this out years ago, and her live calligraphy shows, performed in a kimono, pay tribute to the movement inherent in this tradition.

The idea for calligraphy performances came to her in a very unexpected way. “I was really drawn to the way rappers and DJs were able to express themselves within a culture they liked,” Mami explains. “I wanted to do calligraphy, but I wanted to do it like them. In those days [2010], live painting was just starting to take root in Japanese clubs, so I rode that wave.”

Hip hop’s appeal for her runs even deeper, since graffiti plays an important role in her style. “I’ve liked hip hop since I was 12, and found the graffiti on CD jackets fascinating. And when I was 16, some graffiti suddenly appeared on the road between my house and my calligraphy class. I felt very close to graffiti then,” she recalls. It didn’t take long for her to start drawing a line between them, so to speak.

Mami is part of a worldwide network of “calligraffiti” artists who bring together street art and calligraphy. Many of them, like her, developed their styles individually, only later realizing there was a global scene. A couple of years ago, a book titled “The Art of Writing Your Name” attempted to bring this nebulous scene together, and it featured Mami within its pages.

Her interest in art began very early on. “I started noticing that I could make others happy with the pictures I drew when I was only four years old,” she says. Before age ten, she was already doing calligraphy, which her parents and teachers introduced to her. She went on to study the history of calligraphy at university.

Despite her love for the rebellious nature of hip hop and graffiti, Mami has a clear appreciation for tradition. When speaking on the topic, she’s downright poetic: “Tradition is a tree. Its roots don’t change, but as its age-rings multiply, its branches split and its leaves scatter. I would love for my work to become a part of that tree.”